The Young and the Restless

Entrepreneurship, says Business Week, “is no longer a dirty word.”

Well, better late than never, I guess. Thanks for getting on the bus 20 YEARS LATE.

B-Week Online is celebrating entrepreneurship this week because it’s running a stunt to identify America’s Best Entrepreneurs Under 25. It’s a pretty impressive list of ventures for folks so young: software companies, video services, telecom, publishing, even hazardous waste transport.

You can read all about these disgustingly young, smart and accomplished people here. At the end of your tour, you can even vote for your favorite.

BusinessWeek: last on the entrepreneurship bandwagon, but first in Web interactivity.

By the way, cynical readers may notice that only two of the 20 nominated entrepreneurs are women.

The stats, as we have noted before, show that women are now starting more businesses than men. But the fact remains that most of those firms are personal-services business – not the fast-growth tech businesses, manufacturers or B-to-B services that tend to impress (or even interest) journalists and VCs.

If you want to read a list of impressive women entrepreneurs, PROFIT magazine published its list this month of Canada’s Top 100 Women-Owned Businesses. Check it out at http://www.profitguide.com/w100/index.asp.

By the way, when I left PROFIT a few years ago, I advised my successor, Ian Portsmouth, that three ambitious lists a year (the PROFIT 100, the Hot 50 emerging growth companies, and the Women 100) were too many for a magazine with limited resources.

Ian didn’t listen. He thinks all three lists are essential to our understanding of today’s economy and to the promotion of Canada’s best entrepreneurs, and he’s exactly right.
(Though overworked.)